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Baby Abandoned in a Burger King Reunites With Birth Mom Nearly 30 Years Later, Thanks to Facebook

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Facebook; Burger King

On September 15, 1986, a baby, only a few hours old, was found wrapped in a red sweater in the bathroom of a Burger King in Allentown, Pa. Police tried to track down the baby's mother, but couldn't. Almost three decades later, the "Burger King Baby" gave it another shot.

Katheryn Deprill, 27, a married mother of three and EMT, posted a picture on her Facebook: "Looking for my birth mother...She abandoned me in the Burger King bathroom...Please help me find her by sharing my post. Maybe she will see this. Thank you."

Deprill learned about her, uh, unique birth when she was 12 years old and had to do a project for school about her family's history. She told NBC that learning the truth was "mind blowing." Obviously.

Now, she has questions. Again: Obviously. She wants to know if she has any biological siblings, she wants to know her medical history. And she wants to know why she was abandoned in the bathroom at Burger King. "What made her do it? Why did she feel that she shouldn't leave me at a hospital?" Deprill asked. "Was she going through a horrible time?"

She also had something she wanted to tell her bio mom. Something that might surprise most people: "I would really like to say, 'Thank you for not throwing me away, thank you for giving me the gift of life, and look what I've become,'" she said at the time.

Katheryn asked Facebook for help and, in less than a month and with some 30,000 shares, she found her mom. Now, she says, "She is better than anything I could've ever imagined. She is so sweet and amazing. I'm so happy."

On their first meeting, Deprill says: "It looked like I was looking in a mirror...I got the hug that I had wanted for the last 27 years, and that broke the ice. I asked if I could have it, and she said, 'absolutely,' and just held her arms open, and the rest is history."

"The mother told [Deprill's attorney] she became pregnant after she was raped at age 16 by a stranger during a family vacation in a foreign country. Ashamed and embarrassed, he said, she hid the pregnancy.

The mother...said she gave birth in her bedroom at age 17 without her parents' knowledge and drove to Burger King to drop off the baby, knowing the restaurant would be crowded and someone would find the infant."

"We are definitely going to have a relationship," Katheryn concludes. (Oh, and for the record: The statute of limitations on child abandonment is only two years, according to a statement by the local district attorney. Even if that abandonment happened in a Burger King.)

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